Sausage, Chips and Beans since you ask.
Science, as They Might Be Giants (what? them again. Yes, TMBG easily lend themselves to lyric quotes as the contributors to this site illustrate) once said, is Real. You can prove stuff with it and everything. But when I was a wee bairn (circa AD1976) science was like magic. Rockets! Computors! (they should have stuck with that spelling) Moonbases! Atomic Power! Ah, the future (the native habitat of science) was going to be great.
So, ok, we have iPods and smartphones but where is my transmat? (actually I'm with Dr McCoy there - you wouldn't get me in one of those things). We certainly should have made contact with UFOnauts by now. Very disappointing.
In fact I know roughly the period when I fell out of love with science. It was around 1988 during my abandoned Physics with Astrophysics degree. That's around the time that they tell you that it's not magic but is in fact very hard work that require a lot of high-powered maths. Oh, Professor Brian Cox, there's only so far your populist vibe can take a chap before he realises that Things Can Not Only Get Better But Can Get Worse Too. Is it any wonder that I retreated (albeit half-heartedly) into the world of making things up instead of studying how real things work.
But in the course of making stuff up you want things to have really cool names. Here is where science becomes your friend again, because a lot of science stuff just sounds ace. I know it's annoying for scientists to hear genuine terms bandied about incorrectly (hell, the phrase 'inspired by the science of genes' makes even my lame-ass physics brain start to fizz) but as Han Solo knew when talking about the Falcon doing the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs accuracy shouldn't get in the way of awesomeness (although look here for some attempts to explain away Han's gobbledegook).
Two of my favourite cool science names are the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud.
The Kuiper Belt is where all the space rocks and the occasional dwarf planet (like Pluto) hang out on the edge of the solar system. Not only does it sound fab in its own right, but all the stuff connected with it does too. Trans-Neptunian Objects or TNOs, KBOs (which stands for Kuiper Belt Objects but is hilarious for being the same acronym as Winston Churchill's sign-off of 'Keep Buggering On'), Plutinos, Cubewanos (from 'QB1-O' or 'object similar to QB1' which was one of the first objects to be found beyond Neptune besides Pluto and its moon, Charon). The only thing that would make it sound any more ace was if it was double-barrelled. (What's that you say? It's also known as the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt? Hot dawg!) Got most of this info from our old friend Wikipedia. More here.
The Oort Cloud is even further away from the sun. It's where all the comets live, nearly a light year away. It's only hypothetical too, which to me is the litmus test for cool science as we don't want any facts spoiling potential awesomeness like when they declared that there weren't dinosaurs living on Venus after all (yes, as a child I had a proper science book that theorised that conditions on Venus might be like those on Earth millions of years ago so there could be dinosaurs. It even had an illustrations. Look, even Carl Sagan thinks there might be dinosaurs there. Or something:
But is there a double-barrelled version of its name for extra aceness? Why yes. It's also called the Öpik–Oort Cloud. That's right - like that guy who left weathergirl Siân Lloyd for a Cheeky Girl.
And that's where we'll leave it.
More soonliest.
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